Taking Pictures on Shaky Ground
(response to Walead Beshty's post on LACMA's Pictures Without Words)
In a most fascinating set of historical and quotational twists and turns,
from Barthes to Malevich to Star Trek, Beshty lays out a meandering path
that strangely culminates and resonates most profoundly, for me, in the
last paragraph – a hope for photographic practice to be found in embracing
an in-between space, what German urban planner Thomas Sieverts has termed
‘zwischeinstadt’, literally meaning between the urban and the country. Although
I will engage with this notion more later on, it is important to first mine Beshty’s
thoughtful reckoning with various art histories, laying bare a surprising assumption
of a sort of grand theoried master narrative at work in the heart of historical image
production. It seems a reflection that leaves us at a loss, singing to institutional
choirs and fighting discursive windmills, finding ourselves staring down the nihilistic
failure of “this has been” of photography itself.
Beshty is clearly questioning the weight of a heavy-handed history of image
making that has informed and molded him and his practice, as it has most
of ours who have gone through the professionalizing process of the medium
in our various art school careers. However, throughout his essay, there
reads a progressive building up of the assumed monumentality of theoried
discourse as the dictation of practice as opposed to the supporter of an
image making practice. It is this assumption that there ever was (or is)
a dictating authority that seems an engaging point to start talking about
the chicken and the egg scenario in this schism between theory and practice,
a schism that weighs down many contemporary artists I know.
Perhaps the hardest thing to acknowledge is that such monumentality and
authority that has dictated art/image historical presumptions is no longer
as valid, and that whatever agency there is in the production of photographs
must now be claimed at a time more uncertain, theoretically or otherwise,
then at any point in our art historical past. Taking pictures on shaky ground
is far more difficult than answering the call of scientific, political or theoretical
‘truths’. I am not saying, of course, that there aren’t elements of these
motivations that feed into why we do what we do, but there no longer seems
to be such singularity of purpose or passionate hold. Such disappointed
relationships and nostalgic nods to a more utopian past have already been
explored by the likes of early Sam Durant and described at length in Beshty's
article. Finding ourselves embedded in this critical moment in photography
with the total dissolution of an assumed ‘real’, parallels exist with what painting
went through with the image in the late 70s and early 80s and the demise of
high modernism. Of course, from a contemporary perspective, this past seems
grounded and linear, and is edited as needed in an attempt to interpret historical
trends among a set of mitigating circumstances. But the question is, after breaking
apart what doesn’t quite apply anymore, what are the other options available?
What is the exit before the last exit?
One “seductive promise” offered by Beshty is that of materialist critique. At certain
moments I question if this recent turn to abstraction is simply a retreat into materiality.
It isn’t totally, of course. A whole world of work that is self-conscious of its medium-ness
has burst onto (or been rediscovered) by the scene, with a push towards the concreteness
of the material as a possible alternative to the almost existential crisis of representation,
institutional critique and postmodernism. Embracing notions of making “pictures more
picture-like” is one avenue that image-making has recently tended, from Beshty’s large
scale photograms and whacked out, x-rayed negatives, to Elad Lassry’s use of frames that
reference perfectly slick commercial images, to James Welling’s long standing dance with
photographicness to Eileen Quinlan’s smoke and mirrors.
However, what I find more compelling than this self-reflexivity is the direction Beshty turns
in his final paragraph, laying out the potential to be found in in-between spaces, describing
“infrastructional interstital zones” that “stand as compromised, indeterminate way stations
between chimerical destinations”, arguing for uncoded and unprocessed space as a momentary
place of hope - a potential autonomous zone where authorship and origin are set aside.
But how to actualize this?
Along with Deleuze & Guattari, interrogating the potential of these interstitial spaces was mined
by the German urban planner and theorist Thomas Sieverts in the late 90s, coining the term
‘zwischeinstadt’, literally translated as between the urban and the country, “between the place
as a living space and the non-places of movement.” Although Sieverts’ premise has an
architectural and planning basis, a possible application of the theory resonates profoundly for
art-making and writing, and is for me pointedly appropriate to the problematics of photography
and its relation to my interests in (the fiction of/violation of) documentary, mapping and its
resulting imaginary.
So a critical question presents itself - how does this theoretical or aesthetics space refer or
have relation to real space, especially in regards to photography? A recent project exploring
the possibility of playing with these ideas (and not just photographically) is manifested with
Suddenly: Where We Live Now, a project spearheaded by inspired curator Stephanie Snyder
and mischievous bon vivant and author Matthew Stadler. Culminating in a traveling exhibition,
public programs and publication (see www.suddenly.org and web.reed.edu/gallery/), the entirety
of the project attempts to find “new ways” and “new descriptions that give the landscape where
we live an independent identity in the imagination of its occupants,” proposing a new engagement
to displace traditional binary notions of “the city” and “the countryside”. Just as Beshty concludes
with momentary openings as possible trajectories away from traditional dialectics of either/or
thinking, whether in utopian/apocalyptic thinking or in the political/formalist opposition, Suddenly
attempts to unravel the authoritative presumptions of mapping and land use, literally and
metaphorically. And perhaps it is here, with such active experiments - as when, in a real-time
affair called the Backroom, Thomas Sieverts and Aaron Betsky are in conversation about
transitional space as we’re all eating gourmet Thai food, arguing about how images and the
imaginary function, dripping wet at dusk in the rain, under a temporary structure/autonomous
zone in an almost abandoned parking lot a half an hour outside of town a weekend-long
symposium about this very question of spaces between – that it is here, when theory is stripped
of its monumentality and included in the active and lived construction of meaning, that it can
take a more appropriate place as reflector of the artistic condition as opposed to determinant
of the artistic act.
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